by Colette
6. Miscellaneous Cultural References. The Marinetti who speaks in Italian of Renée’s gaiezza volpina may be the major Futurist writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944), then living in Paris, where his manifesto of the new movement was published in 1909.
Dranem was the stage name (his real surname spelled backward) of Armand Ménard (1869–1935), a starring comic singer in vaudeville and musicals.
Lucren Lévy-Dhurmer (1865–1953) painted portraits and executed murals in public buildings.
Jean-Louis Forain (1852–1931), painter, cartoonist, and wit, had done a lithographic portrait of Colette; the Chabot and Potel he refers to in the novel would seem to be fictional connotations of artistic mediocrities.
Leopoldo Fregoli (1867–1936) was the most celebrated quick-change artist, playing multiple characters in one-man sketches that he wrote himself.
The term “unknown masterpiece” refers to the title of a famous novelette by Balzac.
Both the “raucous dance” performed by Jadin on Christmas Eve and the “wild waltz” mentioned later on are actually the acrobatic valse chaloupée created at the Moulin-Rouge in 1907 by Mistinguett and Max Dearly, and popular for some ten years thereafter; it eventually familiarized the world with the figure of the apache (Parisian thug), that term having been made current by a journalist in 1902. Similarly, the much older term pierreuse, rendered in the present translation as “streetwalker,” had been revitalized by an 1893 song performed by Eugénie Buffet (Édith Piaf’s role model as a proletarian songstress). These examples will help to indicate how current, and how meaningful to contemporary Frenchmen, so many of the references in The Vagabond were.
Rosa Bonheur (1822–1899) was the most famous French animal painter (The Horse Fair, etc.).
Where the present translation reads “coalmines in Silesia,” the French text refers directly to the Polish Silesian town of Sosnowiec.
Félicien Rops (Belgian-born; 1833–1898) was an artist who specialized in female nudes and scenes of depravity.
Carolina Otero (1868–1965) was a famous Spanish singer and dancer who had arrived in Paris by 1889, and who eventually performed all over Europe and in the United States. A friend and colleague of Colette’s, she appeared in pantomimes from 1900 to 1908. Otero retired in 1918 and published her memoirs in 1926.
The great Russian bass Feodor Chaliapin (1873–1938) had taken Paris by storm in 1908 when he sang the role of Boris Godunov during Diaghilev’s first French season; he was noted for his highly expressive acting.
The quotation from Paul Verlaine (1844–1896) is a single verse from his cynical surprise-ending poem “Cythère” in the 1869 volume Fêtes galantes (Erotic Entertainments). After depicting an idyllic lovers’ tryst, the poem concludes: “And love satisfying our every need, except / hunger, sorbets and preserves / save us from feeling gripes.”
Valeria Messalina was the libidinous, adulterous wife of the Roman emperor Claudius, who finally had her executed in 48 A.D.
The attribution of the 1847 Fleurs animées to the artist and writer Grandville (1803–1847) is due to the translator; the French text credits it to a Champfleury, and the only celebrity by that name whom I can identify is the novelist (1821–1869) who championed Realism in literature and art.
Boni (Boniface) de Castellane (1867–1932) was an elegant playboy who lived off his wife’s fortune (derived from the Gould railroad empire in the United States).
In the 1884 Massenet opera Manon, the heroine sings the aria “Adieu, notre petite table” in Act Two, just before deserting her young lover for an older but richer one. I have been unable to identify the Poliche in which a muff is used as a source of sentiment.
The quotation beginning “At the third city” is from a text that, in her 1945 Belles saisons (Beautiful Seasons), Colette calls an old ballad from the provinces; there, in a strictly analogous situation, she cites a few more lines, referring to “the first city,” where the lover’s gift to the girl is a white satin gown.
The celebrated Moulin-à-Vent vintage is from Burgundy, grown in an area near Beaujolais and Mâcon.
The “galley” in the tricky sequence about galleys and laundry boats is a reference to Molière’s 1671 comedy Les fourberies de Scapin (Scapin’s Wily Tricks), in which that clever servant extorts money from his master claiming that the master’s son has inadvertently boarded a pirate galley and is being held for ransom. The old man’s querulously repeated lament, “Why, oh why, did he go onto that galley?” has become a stereotyped expression in French connoting, “How did he get into such a mess?”
7. The Sequel to The Vagabond. Colette, who was prone to milking her own experiences endlessly, had a fatal weakness for sequels, which were usually inferior to the first formulations of her stories. In the 1913 L’entrave (The Shackle; its serial publication, apparently as a work in progress, was interrupted by the birth of Colette’s daughter), the time (as it was in reality) is three years after the end of The Vagabond. Renée has been retired for a year; Fossette, Hamond, and Margot are dead; but Margot, who, in The Vagabond was already supporting Renée financially despite her being “robbed” by all and sundry, has left Renée an inheritance that gives her plenty to live on.
Holidaying in Nice, the still unattached and lonely exvaudevillian catches sight of Max with a wife and child. She still feels the “shackle” of the “leash” she had almost submitted to (the same impossibility of equality between marriage partners is firmly posited in this new novel as well).
Renée meets a remarkable trio: May, a plebeian girl (very similar to Jadin in The Vagabond), May’s unfathomable lover Jean (who comes on as a garden-variety roughneck), and Jean’s toady Masseau (based on the real-life writer Paul Masson, whose sparkling wit makes him the comic relief (funnier than Brague) of this novel.
Running into Brague again, in Geneva (Colette had performed there in 1912), Renée finds that their old act is now sandwiched between two film showings in an old circus building; no longer a professional, she is excluded from Brague’s existence.
With May off in Paris, Jean now reveals his basic good sense and an unexpected gift for eloquence, and when they, too, are back in the capital, Renée finally goes to bed with him and they begin an affair. Renée is alarmed when May, unaware that Renée is the woman who has supplanted her, reports that she’s not upset about Jean’s having left her, because he has a bad reputation for jilting his women. As Jean’s kept woman, Renée feels even les free than she would be as a wife. When circumstances compel Jean to spend a lot of time away from her, they sense that their liaison is approaching its end; but she gets him back by threatening to return to the stage. He accuses her, rightly, of underestimating him and imagining she can plumb his thoughts; and they agree to stay together (just as Colette had consented to remarry in real life).
III: The Present Translation
The translation of The Vagabond in this volume is absolutely complete, and quite faithful—but in a liberal sense of the word. On a very few occasions, in order not to jolt a reader less than thoroughly conversant with French language and civilization, an interpretive word or two has been inserted (e.g., the Rue Pergolèse is called “the fashionable Rue Pergolèse,” or the bare name Fregoli is glossed as “a quick-change artist like Fregoli”). Here and there, specific names are replaced by paraphrases (e.g., le boulevard extérieur is rendered as “slums at the edge of town,” and the Conservatoire appears as “the national school of music and drama”). Generic terms for commercial products have occasionally been substituted for brand names.
The only completely free rendering is my new English lyric for Jadin’s song, “The Lily-of-the-Valley Waltz.” Though my version retains the same basic situation of a beau offering a bouquet, and features a double entendre on the very same part of the male anatomy, I felt that, in the body of the novel, it was necessary to give an actual song text rather than a straight translation. The literal translation of the original French is: “Ah! ah! little Muguette, / Ah! ah! do come,
please, / So I can pin on you / My little bou—quet of muguet (lily-of-the-valley).” The long pause after the syllable bou- makes it sound like bout (“cock”) and makes the preceding line seem to mean “So I can stick in you . . .”
The present translation is resolutely American,6 striving to render idioms and slang by their current (not historic) American counterparts; to avoid false cognates (e.g., défiant is here correctly translated as “mistrustful” or “cautious,” not “defiant”); and to eliminate any ambiguous use of English words that have multiple meanings, so that the reader won’t be left guessing.
* * *
1 The earliest Claudine book had been written between 1894 and 1896.
2 Chéri, translated and introduced by the translator of the present volume, was published by Dover as a dual-language book in 2001 (ISBN 0-486-41599-6).
3 If that’s really the meaning behind the odd expression “casts a black-and-white glance,” on the dog’s first appearance (it could conceivably mean something like “casts a grim and blank glance”).
4 The fictional Empyrée-Clichy theater, the name of which combines a fanciful designation with the thoroughfare on which it’s located, is said to stand for a real house known as the Gaîté-Rochechouart (the Boulevard Rochechouart is the major artery of Montmartre).
5 In subsections 5 and 6, the items follow the sequence of their appearance in the novel. Only specific aspects of the cities are commented on, not the cities themselves, with the exception of the less familiar Saint-Étienne.
6 In contrast to the only prior translation, by Enid McLeod, originally published by Secker and Warburg, London, in 1954. Though that translation is at least 95% correct, and often flavorful to boot, in many places (especially passages of slang) it is almost hermetically British.
The Vagabond
Part One
TEN THIRTY . . . Once again I’m ready too early. My partner Brague, who helped me out when I was starting in pantomime, frequently reproaches me for this in picturesque terms:
“In a big hurry, aren’t you, you damned amateur! There’s always a fire burning under your ass. If it was up to you, we’d smear on our foundation at seven thirty while munching our appetizers!”
Three years of vaudeville and plays haven’t changed me; I’m always ready too early.
Ten thirty-five . . . If I don’t open that book, which I’ve read over and over—the book lying around on my makeup shelf—or the racing form that my dresser was ticking off names in with the tip of my eyebrow pencil, I’m going to end up alone with myself, face to face with that rouged and powdered adviser looking at me from out of the mirror with deepset eyes, their lids rubbed with a greasy purplish paste. She has bright cheekbones, the same color as garden phlox, and very dark-red lips, shiny as if varnished . . . She fixes a long gaze on me, and I know she’s about to speak . . . She’s going to say:
“Is that really you there? There, all alone, in this cage with white walls on which idle, impatient, captive hands have scratched monograms and which they’ve embellished with naively dirty pictures? On these plastered walls, painted fingernails like yours have written a marooned woman’s unconscious cry for help . . . In back of you a woman’s hand has engraved ‘Marie . . . ,’ the end of the name breaking out into an ardent flourish that rises like a scream . . . Is that really you there, all alone, beneath the ceiling that’s buzzing as it’s shaken by the dancers’ feet like the floor of a mill in operation? Why are you there all alone? Why not elsewhere? . . . ”
Yes, it’s that dangerous hour of lucidity . . . Who will knock at the door of my dressing room? What face will come between me and that adviser in her makeup spying on me from out of the mirror? . . . Chance, who is my friend and my master, will surely deign once more to send me the genii from his ill-regulated kingdom. My sole remaining faith is in him, and in myself. In him, especially; he fishes me out when I’m sinking, grabs me and shakes me, like a life-saving dog whose teeth pierce my skin a little each time . . . So that, whenever I’m in despair, I no longer expect my death, but some adventure, some little commonplace miracle that, like a gleaming clasp, will reassemble and hold together the necklace of my life.
It’s faith, it’s truly faith, with its sometimes feigned blindness, with the jesuitry of its renunciations and its obstinate hope at the very moment when I cry, “I’m completely deserted! . . . ” Truly, the day that my master, Chance, bore another name in my heart, I could become a very good Catholic . . .
How the floor is shaking tonight! You can tell it’s cold: the Russian dancers are trying to keep warm. When they all shout “Ho!” together with the shrill, hoarse voice of young pigs, it will be eleven ten. My clock is infallible; it doesn’t lose or gain five minutes in a month. At ten I get here; Madame Cavallier is singing her three songs, “The Little Vagrants,” “The Farewell Kiss,” and “A Little ‘Somebody.’” At ten ten, Antoniev and his dogs. At ten twenty-two, rifle shots, barks, the end of the dog act. The iron staircase creaks and someone coughs: it’s Jadin coming down. She swears while coughing because she steps on the hem of her dress every time—it’s a ritual . . . Ten thirty-five, the comic singer Bouty. Ten forty-seven, the Russian dancers. And finally eleven ten: me!
Me . . . When that word arose in my thoughts, I looked at the mirror involuntarily. It’s really me there all the same, with a red-purple mask, my eyes ringed with a greasy blue halo that’s beginning to melt . . . Will I wait for the rest of my face to wash away, too? What if all that will be left of my reflection is a colored trickle, stuck to the glass like a long, muddy tear? . . .
But it’s really freezing here! I rub together my hands, gray with cold beneath the liquid white pigment, which is crackling. Of course! The radiator pipe is ice-cold: it’s Saturday, and on Saturdays this management relies on the plebeian audience, that merry, rowdy, and slightly tipsy audience, to warm up the auditorium. They never think about the performers’ dressing rooms.
A knock with a strong fist shakes my door, and my very ears are startled. I open the door, and there is my partner Brague, got up as a Romanian bandit, swarthy and conscientious.
“We’re on, you know?”
“I know. And not a minute too soon. You can catch your death here!”
At the top of the iron staircase that ascends to the stage, the welcome dry and dusty heat wraps around me like a comfortable, dirty coat. While the ever-meticulous Brague supervises the erection of the set and the installation of the rear rack of lights—the one that supplies the sunset—I automatically glue my eye to the bright round hole in the curtain.
It’s a fine Saturday crowd in this popular neighborhood vaudeville house. A dark auditorium, which the spotlights are unable to illuminate completely, and in which you couldn’t possibly find a man in a shirt collar from the tenth row in the orchestra all the way to the second balcony! A brown haze floats over it all, wafting the awful stench of cold tobacco and cheap cigars smoked down to the smallest stump . . . On the other hand, the four stage boxes are as resplendent as flower stands . . . A fine Saturday! But, to use young Jadin’s drastic expression:
“Who gives a damn? I don’t get a percentage of the take!”
Right from the first few bars of our overture, I feel relieved and in tune; I’ve become unburdened and free from responsibility. Leaning my elbow against the canvas balcony, I serenely observe the powdery layer—mud from shoes, dust, dog hairs, crushed rosin—that covers the boards on which in a little while I’ll be dragging my bare knees, and I sniff at a red artificial geranium. From that moment on, I’m no longer part of myself, and all is well! I know that I won’t fall while dancing, that my heel won’t catch in the hem of my skirt, that when I collapse, manhandled by Brague, I won’t scrape my elbows or flatten my nose. Keeping a straight face, I’ll vaguely hear the young stagehand who, at the most dramatic moment, imitates the sound of farts behind the flat, to crack us up . . . The harsh light carries me through, the music governs my gestures, and a mysterious discipline both subject
s and protects me . . . All’s well.
All is very well! Our poorly lit Saturday audience has rewarded us with an uproar in which there were bravos, whistles, shouts, and well-meant obscenities, and I received, right on the corner of my mouth, a small bunch of penny carnations, those anemic white ones which the woman who sells flowers out of a basket dips into a red liquid to dye them . . . I carry it off pinned to my jacket lapel; it smells of pepper and wet dogs.
I also carry off a letter I’ve just been handed:
“Madame, I was in the first row of the orchestra; your talent as a mime leads me to believe that you possess other talents, even more special and more captivating; give me the pleasure of having supper with me tonight . . . ”
It’s signed “Marquis de Fontanges” (I swear!) and it was written at the Delta Café . . . How many scions of noble families, long thought to be extinct, take up residence at the Delta Café? . . . Unlikely as it may seem, I suspect that this Marquis de Fontanges is a close relative of that Comte de Lavallière who offered me afternoon tea last week in his bachelor apartment. Commonplace hoaxes, but you can detect in them that romantic love for high society and that respect for coats-of-arms which shelter beneath so many shapeless peaked caps in this neighborhood of hooligans.